Let's Push 'Reset' On Our Paradigms

It's not easy to admit when you fail at something, especially when the thing you've failed at is supposed to be your professional strength.

And yet, that's exactly what I did.

I launched a program and it was met with ... *crickets* ...

And I am supposed to be a digital marketer!

In Spring 2018, I announced my concept for The Integrity Project --> a twelve-month program to help progressive entrepreneurs to align their business practices with their good intentions.

Not one person signed up.

Few people even seemed interested in the concept.

I moved on, and I got absorbed in my 1:1 coaching and my digital marketing clients, but I didn't forget the concept behind the course.

I was still curious – when so many people KNOW what the right thing to do is, WHY do we still see so much injustice in the way we do business? What is this disconnect between individual intentions and systemic oppression?

After months of noodling on the question, I began to feel the answer was a kind of 'pathology' - a mental illness - that, instead of being situated in the minds of the individual, was a pathology played out on a societal level.

But society is just the sum total of individuals making choices, right? So what gives?

It wasn't until the brilliant Kelly Mahalak began to teach about consciousness grids that I discovered my 'aha' moment when the pieces fell into place.

Our broken system is much more than the choices of individuals, it's a pathological consciousness grid that we are all, to greater or lesser degrees, plugged into – and the work to heal injustice cannot happen exclusively at the level of walking people through facts, logical explanations and providing better alternatives.

Because, more times than not, the rational mind already knows what's right. It's the frightened animal instinct, operating from scarcity and anxiety, that tricks the rational mind into making choices to protect perceived self-interest in the short term, which ends up causing damage to the greater good (including the self's own good) over the long term.

This 'scared animal' mentality underlies the core characteristic of so many unjust systems: the desire to extract more value from a situation than you're contributing.

This imbalanced 'value extraction' - and the resource hoarding that often follows it - has directly led to the practices of colonialism, slavery, land grabbing and the excesses of capitalism we still see today.

It's also what's behind today's common injustices such as paying men more than women, fair access to education, housing and employment for people of color, discrimination against people on the basis of their identity, and so on ...

It's hard to have mercy for the aggressor in an unjust system, but the truth is, underneath their aggression, they are a scared animal that needs to be soothed. They are so scared that they are willing to do awful things to self-protect.

Harder still is recognizing when, in big and small ways, we ourselves are the scared animals, and by extension, we ourselves are the aggressors perpetuating injustice.

So I developed a whole new curriculum for this program - one that focuses first on healing the disconnection, arrhythmia, anxiety and scarcity pictures most of us are grappling with - to calm our nervous systems enough that our rational minds can make better choices in business and in life.

Still a twelve-month program, we start first with learning and establishing the daily, monthly, and seasonal practices you need as a baseline to create a deep sense of connectedness and wellbeing.

Then, from a place of being grounded and safe, we begin to roll out deep strategy and resources to uplevel your mission-driven work, and to build your great work from an ethical foundation.

My plan was to announce this program this spring - and then, all chaos started to break loose across the globe, and I went into deep fear that once again I would launch a program and nobody would sign up.

Honestly, I just froze. I didn't make the sales page. I didn't set up a sales funnel. I didn't start dripping out teaser content. I didn't do any of the things I know, as a marketer, I need to do in order to create buzz and sell this course.

And the amazing thing is, so much of the 'silver lining' in this global pandemic was actually echoed in the curriculum I developed two years ago: for example, the suggestion to champion work from home policies as a way to support disabled workers and reduce our environmental load. Or the need for humans to learn collaborative thinking so that we can protect the most vulnerable among us.

So now I see that my own scared animal mistook a golden opportunity for a poorly timed crisis. There is no 'poorly timed crisis'. There is a greater and greater call for urgency, that will just keep getting louder until we listen.

We are - most of us - stuck at home now, and this is a golden opportunity to push the reset button on the patterns that are not serving us, and to establish a new groundwork for how we want our lives - and our society - to look.

So what I want to do now is make this as easy as possible for all of us to get on board with making the changes we need. No sales page, no funnel, no shenanigans.

If anything I said resonates with you, please drop me a comment, and/or tag someone in the comments who you think would be interested in continuing this conversation.

If there's enough interest, we can set up a group Zoom call to talk more about what the program will entail, and whether you're ready to do the work.

Oh, one more thing. Most of us are hurting financially thanks to the virus-induced recession – and one way or the other, we're all feeling uncertainties and fears. I know it's hard to invest in yourself and your business when it feels like the bottom is about to fall out.

Although I cannot give this program away for free, if you're serious about doing this work then I don't want money to be the one thing that stops you.

You're always welcomed to slide into my DMs, and let's talk about a reduced rate or a payment plan that's comfortable for your budget.